The Tao of Anarchy: There is no God. There is no State. They are all superstitions that are established by the power-hunger psychopaths to divide, rule, and enslave us. It's only you and me, we are all true and real existence though in one short life. That is, We all are capable to freely interact with one another without coercion from anyone. We all are capable to take self-responsibility to find ways to live with one another in liberty, equality, harmony, and happiness before leaving this world forever. We all were born free and equal among all beings on this planet. We are not imprisoned in and by a place with a political name just because we were born there by chance. We are not chained to a set of indoctrinated beliefs that have been imposed upon us by so-called traditions. This Planet is home to all of us. No one owns it. We share the benefits from and responsibility to this Earth. We pledge no oath, no allegiance to no one; submit to no authority. We are all free and equal. The only obligation we all must undertake constantly with consistency is to respect the same freedoms and rights of others.

The Heresy of White Christianity

There are, as Cornel West
has pointed out, only two African-Americans who rose from dirt-poor
poverty to the highest levels of American intellectual life—the writer
Richard Wright and the radical theologian James H. Cone.

Cone, who died in April, grew up in segregated Bearden, Ark., the
impoverished son of a woodcutter who had only a sixth-grade education.
With an almost superhuman will, Cone clawed his way up from the Arkansas
cotton fields to implode theological studies in the United States with
his withering critique of the white supremacy and racism inherent within
the white, liberal Christian church. His brilliance—he was a Greek
scholar and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Swiss theologian Karl
Barth—enabled him to “turn the white man’s theology against him and
make it speak for the liberation of black people.” God’s revelation in
America, he understood, “was found among poor black people.” Privileged
white Christianity and its theology were “heresy.” He was, until the end
of his life, possessed by what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called “sublime madness.”
His insights, he writes, “came to me as if revealed by the spirits of
my ancestors long dead but now coming alive to haunt and torment the
descendants of the whites who had killed them.”

“When it became clear to me that Jesus was not biologically white and
that white scholars actually lied by not telling people who he really
was, I stopped trusting anything they said,” he writes in his posthumous
memoir, “Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian,” published in October.

“White supremacy is America’s original sin and liberation is the
Bible’s central message,” he writes in his book. “Any theology in
America that fails to engage white supremacy and God’s liberation of
black people from that evil is not Christian theology but a theology of
the Antichrist.”

White supremacy “is the Antichrist in America because it has killed
and crippled tens of millions of black bodies and minds in the modern
world,” he writes. “It has also committed genocide against the
indigenous people of this land. If that isn’t demonic, I don’t know what
is … [and] it is found in every aspect of American life, especially
churches, seminaries, and theology.”

Cone, who spent most of his life teaching at New York City’s Union
Theological Seminary, where the theological luminaries Paul Tillich and
Reinhold Niebuhr preceded him, was acutely aware that “there are a lot
of brilliant theologians and most are irrelevant and some are evil.”

Of the biblical story of Cain’s murder of Abel, Cone writes: “… [T]he
Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ He said, ‘I don’t
know; am I my brother’s keeper?’ And the Lord said, ‘What have you done?
Listen: your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!’ ”
Cain, in Cone’s eyes, symbolizes white people, as Abel symbolizes black
people.

“God is asking white Americans, especially Christians, ‘Where are
your black brothers and sisters?’ ” Cone writes. “And whites respond,
‘We don’t know. Are we their keepers?’ And the Lord says, ‘What have you
done to them for four centuries?’ ”

The stark truth he elucidated unsettled his critics and even some of
his admirers, who were forced to face their own complicity in systems of
oppression. “People cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot wrote.
And the reality Cone relentlessly exposed was one most white Americans
seek to deny.

“Christianity is essentially a religion of liberation,” Cone writes.
“The function of theology is that of analyzing the meaning of that
liberation for the oppressed community so they can know that their
struggle for political, social, and economic justice is consistent with
the gospel of Jesus Christ. Any message that is not related to the
liberation of the poor is not Christ’s message. Any theology that is
indifferent to the theme of liberation is not Christian theology. In a
society where [people] are oppressed because they are black, Christian theology must become Black Theology,
a theology that is unreservedly identified with the goals of the
oppressed community and seeking to interpret the divine character of
their struggle for liberation.”

The Detroit rebellion of 1967 and the assassination of Martin Luther
King Jr. a year later were turning points in Cone’s life. This was when
he—at the time a professor at Adrian College, a largely white college in
Adrian, Mich.—removed his mask, a mask that, as the poet Paul Laurence
Dunbar wrote, “grins and lies.”

“I felt that white liberals had killed King, helped by those Negroes
who thought he was moving too fast,” he writes. “Even though they didn’t
pull the trigger, they had refused to listen to King when he proclaimed
God’s judgment on America for failing to deal with the three great
evils of our time: poverty, racism, and war. The white liberal media
demonized King, accusing him of meddling in America’s foreign affairs by
opposing the Vietnam War and blaming him for provoking violence
wherever he led a march. White liberals, however, accepted no
responsibility for King’s murder, and they refused to understand why
Negroes were rioting and burning down their communities.”

“I didn’t want to talk to white people about King’s assassination or
about the uprisings in the cities,” he writes of that period in his
life. “[I]t was too much of an emotional burden to explain racism to
racists, and I had nothing to say to them. I decided to have my say in
writing. I’d give them something to read and talk about.”

Cone is often described as the father of black liberation theology,
although he was also, maybe more importantly, one of the very few
contemporary theologians who understood and championed the radical
message of the Gospel. Theological studies are divided into pre-Cone and
post-Cone eras. Post-Cone theology has largely been an addendum or
reaction to his work, begun with his first book, “Black Theology and Black Power,”
published in 1969. He wrote the book, he says, “as an attack on racism
in white churches and an attack on self-loathing in black churches. I
was not interested in making an academic point about theology; rather, I
was issuing a manifesto against whiteness and for blackness in an effort to liberate Christians from white supremacy.”

Cone never lost his fire. He never sold out to become a feted celebrity.

“I didn’t care what white theologians thought about black liberation
theology,” he writes. “They didn’t give a damn about black people. We
were invisible to their writings, not even worthy of mention. Why should
I care about what they thought?”

“After more than fifty years of working with, writing about, talking
to white theologians, I have to say that most are wasting their time and
energy, as far as I am concerned,” he writes, an observation that I,
having been forced as a seminary student to plow through the turgid,
jargon-filled works of white theologians, can only second. Cone blasted
churches, including black churches that emphasize personal piety and the
prosperity gospel, as “the worst place to learn about Christianity.”

His body of work, including his masterpieces “Martin & Malcolm & America” and “The Cross and the Lynching Tree,”
is vital for understanding America and the moral failure of the white
liberal church and white liberal power structure. Cone’s insight is an
important means of recognizing and fighting systemic and
institutionalized racism, especially in an age of Donald Trump.

“I write on behalf of all those whom the Salvadoran theologian and
martyr Ignacio Ellacuría called ‘the crucified peoples of history,’ ”
Cone writes in his memoir. “I write for the forgotten and the abused,
the marginalized and the despised. I write for those who are penniless,
jobless, landless, all those who have no political or social power. I
write for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and those who are transgender. I
write for immigrants stranded on the U.S. border and for undocumented
farmworkers toiling in misery in the nation’s agricultural fields. I
write for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, on the West Bank, and in East
Jerusalem. I write for Muslims and refugees who live under the terror of
war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. And I write for all people who
care about humanity. I believe that until Americans, especially
Christians and theologians, can see the cross and the lynching tree
together, until we can identify Christ with ‘recrucified’ black bodies
hanging from lynching trees, there can be no genuine understanding of
Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy
of slavery and white supremacy.”

The cross, Cone reminded us, is not an abstraction; it is the
instrument of death used by the oppressor to crucify the oppressed. And
the cross is all around us. He writes in “The Cross and the Lynching
Tree”:

The cross is a paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts
the world’s value system, proclaiming that hope comes by way of defeat,
that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall
be first and the first last. Secular intellectuals find this idea
absurd, but it is profoundly real in the spiritual life of black folk.
For many who were tortured and lynched, the crucified Christ often
manifested God’s loving and liberating presence within the
great contradictions of black life. The cross of Jesus is what empowered
black Christians to believe, ultimately, that they would not be
defeated by the “troubles of the world,” no matter how great and painful
their suffering. Only people stripped of power could understand this
absurd claim of faith. The cross was God’s critique of power—white
power—with powerless love, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.

Present-day Christians misinterpret the cross when they make it a
nonoffensive religious symbol, a decorative object in their homes and
churches. The cross, therefore, needs the lynching tree to remind us
what it means when we say that God is revealed in Jesus at Golgotha, the
place of the skull, on the cross where criminals and rebels against the
Roman state were executed. The lynching tree is America’s cross. What
happened to Jesus in Jerusalem happened to blacks in Arkansas,
Mississippi, and Kentucky. Lynched black bodies are symbols of Christ’s
body. If we want to understand what the crucifixion means for Americans
today, we must view it through the lens of mutilated black bodies whose
lives are destroyed in the criminal justice system. Jesus continues to
be lynched before our eyes. He is crucified wherever people are
tormented. That is why I say Christ is black.

Every once in a while, when Cone expressed something he thought was
particularly important, he would say, “That’s Charlie talking.” To know
Cone was to know Charlie and Lucy, his parents, who wrapped him and his
brothers in unconditional love that held at bay the dehumanizing fear,
discrimination and humiliation that came with living in Jim and Jane
Crow Arkansas. He, like poet and novelist Claude McKay,
said that what he wrote was “urged out of my blood,” adding “in my case
the blood of blacks in Bearden and elsewhere who saw what I saw, felt
what I felt, and loved what I loved.”

The essence of Cone was embodied in this radical love, a love that
was not rooted in abstractions but the particular reality of his parents
and his people. The ferocity of his anger at the injustice endured by
the oppressed was matched only by the ferocity of his love. He cared.
And because he cared, he carried the hurt and pain of the oppressed, the
crucified of the earth, within him. As a boy, after dark, he waited by
the window for his father to return home, knowing that to be a black man
out on the roads in Arkansas at night meant you might never reach home.
He spent his life, in a sense, at that window. He wrote and spoke not
only for the forgotten, but also in a very tangible way for Charlie and
Lucy. He instantly saw through hypocrisy and detested the pretentions of
privilege. He never forgot who he was. He never forgot where he came
from. His life was lived to honor his parents and all who were like his
parents. He had unmatched courage, integrity and wisdom; indeed he was
one of the wisest people I have ever known.

Cone was acutely aware, as Charles H. Long
wrote, that “those who have lived in the cultures of the oppressed know
something about freedom that the oppressors will never know.” He
reminded us that our character is measured by what we have overcome.
Despair, for him, was sin.

“What was beautiful about slavery?” Cone asks in his memoir.
“Nothing, rationally! But the spirituals, folklore, slave religion, and
slave narratives are beautiful, and they came out of slavery.
How do we explain that miracle? What’s beautiful about lynching and Jim
Crow segregation? Nothing! Yet the blues, jazz, great preaching, and
gospel music are beautiful, and they came out of the
post-slavery brutalities of white supremacy. In the 1960s we proclaimed
‘Black is beautiful!’ because it is. We raised our fists to “I’m Black
and I’m Proud,’ and we showed ‘Black Pride’ in our walk and talk, our
song and sermon.”

He goes on:

We were not destroyed by white supremacy. We resisted it, created a
beautiful culture, the civil rights and Black Power movements, which are
celebrated around the world. [James] Baldwin asked black people “to
accept the past and to learn to live with it.” “I beg the black people
of this country,” he said, shortly after “Fire” [“The Fire Next Time”]
was published, “to do something which I know to be very difficult; to be
proud of the auction block, and all that rope, and all that fire, and
all that pain.”

To see beauty in tragedy is very difficult. One needs theological
eyes to do that. We have to look beneath the surface and get to the
source. Baldwin was not blind. He saw both the tragedy and the beauty in
black suffering and its redeeming value. That was why he said that
suffering can become a bridge that connects people with one
another, blacks with whites and people of all cultures with one another.
Suffering is sorrow and joy, tragedy and triumph. It connected blacks
with one another and made us stronger. We know anguish and pain and have
moved beyond it. The real question about suffering is how to use it.
“If you can accept the pain that almost kills you,” says Vivaldo,
Baldwin’s character in his novel Another Country, “you can use it, you
can become better.” But “that’s hard to do,” Eric, another character,
responds. “I know,” Vivaldo acknowledges. If you don’t accept the pain,
“you get stopped with whatever it was that ruined you and you make it
happen over and over again and your life has—ceased, really—because you
can’t move or change or love anymore.” But if you accept it, “you
realize that your suffering does not isolate you,” Baldwin says in his
dialogue with Nikki Giovanni; “your suffering is your bridge.” Singing
the blues and the spirituals is using suffering, letting it become your
bridge moving forward. “For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we
are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be
heard,” Baldwin writes in his short story “Sonny’s Blues.” “There isn’t
any other tale to tell, and it’s the only light we’ve got in all this
darkness.”

“I would rather be a part of the culture that resisted lynching than
the one that lynched,” Cone writes at the end of the book. “I would
rather be the one who suffered wrong than the one who did wrong. The one
who suffered wrong is stronger than the one who did wrong. Jesus was
stronger than his crucifiers. Blacks are stronger than whites. Black
religion is more creative and meaningful and true than white religion.
That is why I love black religion, folklore, and the blues. Black
culture keeps black people from hating white people. Every Sunday
morning, we went to church to exorcize hate—of ourselves and of white
racists.”

There will come difficult moments in our own lives, moments when we
are faced with an impulse, driven by fear or self-interest or simple
expediency, to turn away at the sight of suffering and injustice. We
will hear the cries of the oppressed and want to shut them out. We will
count the cost to our careers, our reputations and perhaps our security,
for to truly stand with the oppressed is to be treated like the
oppressed. But a force greater than our own will compel us to kneel down
and pick up the cross. The weight will cut into our shoulders. Our step
will slow. Our breathing will become labored. We will be condemned by
the powerful and ignored or reviled by the indifferent. But we will
demand justice. And when we do, we will say to ourselves, “That’s Cone
talking.”

One thought on “The Heresy of White Christianity”

Quite a spin on Christianity. The slavers may have claimed to have been Christians but they were failing to live by the Christian principles. This guy makes up his own theology, and that is symptomatic of the problems with Christianity today. There are nearly 30,000 denominations and more new ones sprout up almost every week. How can you slice and dice the teachings of Jesus so many, many ways?!

Jesus was not a black African. And, let us not overlook that the African slave trade to the New World was financed (and enabled) by the Jewish ship owners.